Mythic+ Boss Breakdown - The Difficulty of Xav the Unfallen in Theater of Pain

Posted 2021/04/11 at 9:40 PM by Mandl

Xav the UnfallenTyrannicalTheater of PainXav the Unfallen Mechanics ReviewXav the Unfallen

30 seconds into the pull, and every minute thereafter, Xav picks two targets as part of Blood and Glory and sends them downstairs. For ~2s, they are disabled while being healed to full and transported to the central arena, where they get to come to blows. Every second, anybody downstairs takes 3% extra damage thanks to Glorious Combat. When they come back up, they are once again disabled for ~2s, healed to full, and transported back to the arena. The winner gets a 10% damage increase, while the loser gets a 10% damage reduction. Neither of those shows up in logs, making it very difficult to find out who won.

10 seconds into the pull, and every 30-35s after, Xav creates an Oppressive Banner. This creates the banner we all know and despise. The second it is created, and every 3 seconds after, anybody upstairs loses 15% movement speed, stacking up to 5.

Finally, 15 seconds into the pull and every 35-40s after, Xav casts Might of Maldraxxus and subsequently casts three of the following abilities, at random:

Massive Cleave picks a player and casts a 180-degree cleave aimed at them

Crushing Slam picks a player and casts a ~6yd wide line blast aimed at them

Deafening Crash casts a circular AoE centered on Xav (while he is in the middle of the area), covering ~2/3 of the encounter area. Anybody caught in it takes a hefty amount of damage and is knocked back; everybody else is interrupted irrespective of their position.

Deafening CrashMassive CleaveProblems with Xav the UnfallenBanner Healthlot3.6k party DPS2.5k party DPSall your cooldownsonceEllesmereclicking hereBlessing of FreedomDeath's Advance

Do not be in the middle (as it puts you in a very precarious position for Deafening Crash).

Be as far as your movement abilities allow it from the center so that you are able to get behind the hemispheric cleave should it happen to target you.

Massive CleaveBanner + Duel Overlapat random75%

If neither of the contenders has a particularly noteworthy cooldown, the incentive is to finish the duel as quickly as possible, irrespective of who wins. As such, it may make sense to let specs able to quickly and efficiently kill their opponent win. Similarly, removing absorbs and sitting down (guaranteed crit for the opponent's autos!) also speeds things up.

If, however, one of them has a strong cooldown available, it may make sense to have their opponent "throw" the duel in order to get back upstairs as fast as possible while guaranteeing that the person with the cooldown has a 10% bonus on it.

every trick in the bookWell-Honed InstinctsPinchwhistle "Nitro Fuel"Tyrannical ScalingFortifiedTyrannicalfiveDe Other SideTheater of PaindefinitelyTyrannicalFortifiedMoadmoadreally

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Comments

Comment by best4bond

This article kind of confuses me, because I find Xav the Unfallen to be the easiest boss of all the SL mythic bosses no matter the affix and ToP the easiest Mythic out of all of them no matter the affix. I always find it strange when ToP is listed as being among the harder ones.

Comment by Jigglypuff

Are you talking about difficulty of mechanics, or difficulty of meeting the timer? Because I think the article is more concerned with the latter. Xav eats up a ton of time, even if no one is ever in any danger of dying.

Comment by Kabookiejoe

I don't think you quite understand, losing 2 dps on a tyrannical encounter is just insane, not mention the odd time when u come back up and the banner is down and you're still slowed.

This is why people want tyrannical removed, it just turns bosses into sponges and Blizzard did a poor job of adjust health pools accordingly for tyrannical weeks.

Comment by Myasawa

Am i stupid in the Clip they didnt Focus the Banner they Ignored it. It took cleave/Aoe dmg that was all.

Comment by Shinorulez

Maybe you are one with those mobile classes. Our healer is a priest and he dies 50% of the time. haha (ilevel 210 on +15 tho)

Comment by Chaxton

My group usually has lots of mobility (DH tank, me as a Fury Warrior, Shaman heals, Mage DPS, and some random guy because we never have five). When we did this boss the first time, and every other time after, we always say "lowest dps of the two that get pulled loses on purpose". Whoever that is just constantly presses the sit key so they get hit harder, which lets it end quicker. Nobody is downstairs for long enough that the banner becomes an issue, because one of us throws the duel. It's not as fast as a real duel where you can just forfeit instantly, but it takes like 3-4 seconds. We use one of our shorter cooldowns to make it go faster. It may not be 100% min-max efficient, but it has worked every single time. I've never wiped on Xav at all, even on tyrannical. The other bosses are a whole different story, but that's unrelated. Xav really isn't bad, especially from a casual perspective. Daunting for low dps, sure, but not hard.

Comment by Jigglypuff

Am i stupid in the Clip they didnt Focus the Banner they Ignored it. It took cleave/Aoe dmg that was all.

I remember them at one point practicing not killing it at all. It wouldn't surprise me if they just stopped wasting the dps trying to focus it down if you couldn't kill it before any relevant mechanics went off anyway.

Comment by st1fler

I think a 10% dmg buff is very underwhelming for having 2 players pulled out of the fight for ~15-20 seconds.

Comment by sorrowdemonica

i saw the title of this post and i am like.. "What? difficult?"... lol seriously... this boss is hard? since when? boss is a literal pushover with no hard mechanics ,even on tyrannical weeks in keys +15 and higher.

Only people this boss would be hard for are those possibly with reaction times of a sloth who refused or decide to move out last second of his area of effect attacks or those who tunnel on the boss rather than the banner.

Comment by tremor100

I think part of the bigger issue is boss HP tuning and just not manually tuning &*!@ for tyranical. There are some bosses specifically that even if challeging on fort, are just ridiculous on Tyranical.

My other really big issue with this expasions dungeons are the amount of DPS race bosses that prevent you from DPSing..

Xav - DPS the boss with a massive HP pool, but you also need to burn the banner ASAP, and also were going to remove 2 DPS.
Hakkar - DPS me before i spawn more and more ads, but kill the ads or I get a huge shield. Shield down finally? heres some new adds + the dead ones.
Lich from NW- DPS my shield, but keep moving during comet storm, and im going to send away your DPS. Shield down.. commet storm, shield back up.

To a lesser extent, stitchflesh has a similar issue where if you dont make sure you are cleavin the ad down to die right when stitchflesh goes up, the abombs get out of control fast on tyranical weeks since you want to tunnel the boss when hes down. 2nd boss of NW and Plaguefall has similar implications but also not as bad. This is going to be really interesting when prideful is gone how some of these like hakkar and stitchflesh and first boss of NW are dealt with where you cant just delete it before mechanics get off.

Comment by lovelywaz

Good to see all the experts claiming this boss to be easy with no mechanics. When doing keys upto +9 only, trash is always more deadlier than the bosses anyway!

I always wonder if Blizz REALLY design dungeons keeping mythic plus scaling in mind or if they just come up with some great concepts and throw it in anyway regardless of how worst those mechanics work on higher key levels. They have nerfed/changed pretty much all the mobs/bosses and mechanics in almost every dungeon since launch multiple times and some of these are still terrible.

Comment by Chungtao

Some of these bottlenecks were designed with a kind of payoff in mind, like the aforementioned Xav gauntlet dmg buff/nerf.

Which is fine in itself, but the buff values are extremely off the mark or just don't exist.

Especially in the case of Nalthor in NW, you spend 8s in flight, then 20-30s downstairs, then 10s flying back. And then you get a 100% crit buff for a duration less than half of your downtime (15s).

Making Exile an instant teleport instead of a fancy banish would solve half of the problem, but 100% crit should be 100% dmg instead. Some specs benefit from that buff much more than others.

Comment by grayshirt

Very appreciative for all this info and these wonderfully detailed breakdowns. It's helped me understand this boss better. I look forward to seeing more M+ info in this detailed format.

Comment by fathom81

maybe you dont do +23s and this doesnt apply to you

Comment by Hatedlulx

I timed top on 21 in tyrannical and I still think this boss is easy :)

Comment by Rudy199

Ye, ToP is the easiest and most enjoyable dungeon for me too.

Comment by Certified

i just want to add that this supposed to be one of the coolest bossfights in the game. just the fact that it throws 2 dps players into a duel is awesome.

too bad the most efficient way to do mythic plus is for one player to throw the duel....

Comment by Glepnir

The duel machanic would be a really fun addition to a raid boss, i feel its wasted on a 5 man boss.

Comment by THEBuzzard

Doesnt the boss also have that hard hitting triple attack that is all unloaded on the tank over -3s?

Comment by NiccoloM

Removed(##RESPBREAK##)272##DELIM##Uchur##DELIM##Trolling

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